Stellar
by AustenJane
Summary: They were tethered. One-Shot, takes place five years after Finn's death.


There are some things in life you can't prepare for. For Rachel Berry, this rings true in so many ways; some wonderful, some tragic. As she takes her bow with the bright lights of Broadway shining down upon her, she can't help but feel that in this moment she has gotten everything she has ever wanted, and somehow it just doesn't feel like it's enough. The crowd roars for her, a standing ovation, with a chanting for her to reprise her last song as Fanny Brice. She beams and gives in, never one to not take a chance at performing her favorite roll just one last time. It had been a five year run. Five long, hard, terrible, awful, wonderful, exhilarating years and here she was, twenty-four years old with a Tony and a raging hit on Broadway. She was proud of herself and she was content, but she wasn't whole.

As she retreats backstage after the audience has filed out, she finds her fathers, Kurt, and Santana waiting for her in her dressing room, all with tears in their eyes and flowers in their hands, gushing over how proud they are of her and how now she can finally take some time off and live again. She isn't sure she wants to. They all decide to go to Sardi's to celebrate and she assures them that she'll meet them there just as soon as she takes all her make up off. They bid her a goodbye and warn her that the wine may be all gone if she doesn't hurry. She giggles, loving how Kurt and Santana have become a part of her family and how without those four people heading to Sardi's she isn't sure she would've survived after he had so abruptly gone.

She undresses and puts her robe on as she begins to dab off her make up. As she looks into her vanity mirror she notices a vase with flowers in the corner that wasn't there before. She eyes them suspiciously; unsure of how they even got there, the beautiful white daisies. An alarming pang in her stomach causes her to hurry over to the flowers, instantly desperate to find out who they're from. She hasn't been serious enough with anyone in so long, she can't imagine she'd have a "Secret Admirer," or even a thoughtful ex-boyfriend. She opens the stiff envelope and it says nothing on the outside and on the inside are just a bunch of X's and Y's and numbers and decimal points and she begins to wonder if this was some weirdo fan that was trying to speak to her in code. She resolves to leave it alone and continues to fix herself for dinner. As she shuts the lights to her dressing room, she can't help but feel a draw to those daisies and slips the envelope they came with into her pocket. Damn curiosity.

After a wonderful dinner with her fathers, Kurt, Santana, and Blaine who had apologized profusely for missing her last show, she opted to walk back to her apartment to breathe in the city air on a crisp early-spring night. She dug her hands into her pockets as she looked up at the majestic night sky. There was something different about it tonight, she couldn't help but notice the stars looking brighter and more illuminated than she had ever seen them before despite the glaring lights of Manhattan. She felt the paper in her pocket and opened it again, trying to understand what on earth it meant when it hit her.

She raced back into her apartment, not even greeting her cat Evita, and jumped onto her bed where her laptop laid. She opened it up and with racing fingers pulled up the website for the star registry. She hastily typed in the numbers, _coordinates_, she corrected herself, and there presented before her was the image of a gleaming, white star that bared the name: **Finn Hudson.**_ Of course_.

_"It's your own star"  
"You named a star after me?"  
"No, I thought about that but then I named it Finn Hudson, because there is already a star called Rachel Berry and she's right here on earth and she's brighter than any of those stars up there. So I wanted to make sure that whenever she feels lonely, she can look up at the sky and no matter where I am, she can know that I'm looking down on her."_


End file.
